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Fact and Fiction in Current Exhibitions of Dead Sea Scrolls

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Fact and Fiction in Current Exhibitions of Dead Sea Scrolls NORMAN GOLB The University of Chicago FACT AND FICTION IN CURRENT EXHIBITIONS OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS — A Critical Notebook for Viewers — Six decades after their discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls are still being treated in many quarters as merely the writings of a small sect that once inhabited an austere desert location near the area where they were discovered. Nowhere is this effort being more ardently pursued than in the present series of Scroll exhibitions taking place here in the States. This series, while rooted in showings of previous decades, was developed and formulated only during the past few years, beginning with the exhibit that took place in Charlotte (N.C.) in the spring of 2006. This one was passed on to Seattle’s Pacific Science Center (Autumn 2006). From there it traveled to Kansas City’s Discovery Place (Winter and Spring 2007), and it is now moving to San Diego’s Natural History Museum, with an opening planned for the end of June 2007. It must be noted that the wording of the descriptions in the exhibit plaques has been formulated in consultation with and subject to the approval of the responsible curators at the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem. While variations in wording can be found in each of the exhibitions, the basic idiom and associated message remain the same: they have in common an effort to convince the public of the truth of the old theory, created in the infancy of Scroll scholarship, that these manuscripts were written in whole or at least in large part by a Jewish sect of Essenes supposedly living at a site — Khirbet Qumran — located in the Judaean Wilderness near the Dead Sea shore. These claims contradict the presently known accumulation of evidence, adduced by growing numbers of text scholars and archaeologists, demonstrating that the Scrolls are of Jerusalem origin, that Khirbet Qumran was a secular site with no connection to a religious sect, and that the Scrolls lack any organic relation to that site. (On the San Diego museum’s announced plan to minimize the significance of the recent findings of Israeli archaeologists relative to these conclusions, in a “virtual reality” film to be projected on a giant screen, see Appendix below.) The current exhibitions exclude from their presentations virtually all of the salient evidence pointing towards the Jerusalem origin of the Scrolls, while manifestly distorting that particular portion of the evidence which they do adduce. In addition, the actual descriptions of the manuscripts are often slanted in ways that obscure the historical understanding of these texts. Having recently studied the Kansas City exhibit in detail, I here offer the most problematic examples of the claims being made — both for the possible benefit of those who have visited the past exhibits, but also for the consideration of the San Diego public and all other future viewers of this traveling show, in whatever incarnations it might take. The claims include the following: • Soon after introductory panels present the basic themes of the exhibit, visitors are informed that the famous Copper Scroll of Cave 3 “preserved two oxidized rolls of beaten copper… containing a lengthy list that claimed the existence of hidden treasures. Whether this treasure is real or imaginary remains a tantalizing enigma to this day.” Next to this statement is a replica of the scroll, but no translation of any part of it is given. This is done despite the fact that the Copper Scroll describes the hiding of (a) Temple vessels, (b) large amounts of gold and silver ingots, and (c) scrolls (sefarin) and other texts (ketabin), as well as various localities where the sequestration has taken place. Most of the hiding-places are in the general area of the Judaean Wilderness where the Dead Sea Scrolls were eventually discovered in eleven caves. Perceiving the contradiction between the contents of this scroll and the theory that a sect of wealth- eschewing Essenes lived at Qumran and wrote the scrolls there, Father de Vaux, upon confronting this text in the mid-1950s, declared it a fiction. Had the curators, however, allowed samples of this text to be presented in translation, and had viewers been informed that it has been held to be authentic by the great majority of scholars who have actually researched it during the past three decades, a better understanding of the growing perception that the Scrolls are of Jerusalem origin would have been gained by visitors to the exhibit. The above facts are withheld from the exhibit. • “Cave 11 … provided extensive documents, including … the Temple Scroll.” The futuristic Temple Scroll was handed over to Yigael Yadin by an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem, who removed it from under the floorboards of his house. Until today, the correctness of Yadin’s belief that this scroll derives from Cave 11 has been proven by no one. • “(Scroll jars) … are unique to the Qumran area…. It seems that the Qumran community preferred these cylindrical jars because of the laws of purity…. The jars served as storage containers for ritually pure goods….” Compare “Pottery in Qumran” plaque: “The ceramic pottery found in Qumran are simple, unadorned vessels, typical of the Judean sites of the Second Temple Period.” These statements at first seem to be mutually contradictory, until it becomes apparent that what the curators are suggesting is that the so-called “scroll” jars were unique to Qumran, whereas all the other pottery types found within Kh. Qumran are typical of Judaean sites in general. (The display of “ceramic pottery” is so presented as to exclude the “scroll” jars.) What archaeologists have demonstrated in recent years, 2 however, is that the so-called “scroll jars” have been found also at other sites besides Kh. Qumran, and could well have been utilized for other purposes besides storing scrolls. The curators fail to divulge this information, just as they have failed to include pertinent writings of recent archaeologists (notably those of Dr. Rachel Bar-Nathan of the Israel Antiquities Authority) in the lists of recommended readings accompanying the exhibits. The curators’ pottery claim, as their claim regarding the Copper Scroll, represents only the view of traditional Scroll scholars who still believe that a radical Jewish religious community lived at Kh. Qumran and wrote or at least collected scrolls there. In view of the growing controversy over these and other artifacts (cf. below), the curators in charge could easily have presented a balanced description depicting both views, but they once again opted not to do so. • “A number of inkwells [were] found at Qumran…. Three … were found in the central hall together with the remains of plastered tables and benches. According to some scholars, this hall served as the center of scribal activity; therefore it was named the ‘Scriptorium’.” The “some scholars” who identified the construction referred to as a scriptorium were those who believed the Qumran site they were excavating was a monastery of celibate Essene monks. Other scholars have for good reason opposed this identification. The structure is not a “central hall” but a two-story building, of which the second story collapsed, sending debris down to the ground floor. Two inkwells were found in this debris; a third was found in another Kh. Qumran locus, while a possible fourth, in the private Schuyen collection, is claimed to come from Qumran as well. As archaeologists have pointed out in their writings, such inkwells have been found in other archaeological sites on both sides of the Dead Sea and in Jerusalem, and writing materials were also needed for commercial or military purposes. The presence of inkwells at Qumran cannot reasonably be meant to imply, in the absence of any cogent evidence of religious scribal activity within that site, that either of the two rooms in question served as a monk-like scriptorium. In this regard, archaeologists have shown by careful measurement that the remains of the so-called “plastered tables” found in the debris cannot legitimately be characterized as such. Traditional Qumran scholars claim that scrolls were copied in the upper story of that structure, but until now not a single scroll or fragment has ever been found in the debris there or anywhere else within Khirbet Qumran. The curators of the exhibition, however, fail to mention this fact as well. As for the statement regarding the “scriptorium” belief, it could easily have been extended by a single sentence: namely that, on the basis of the actual evidence, other highly reputable scholars, including (e.g.) Robert Donceel and Pauline Donceel-Voute of the University of Louvain and the late Yizhar Hirschfeld of the Hebrew University, do not agree with the traditional claim, but rather assign entirely different purposes to these rooms having no connection with sectarians. Depending on the precise age of the 3 inkwells, they could have served the needs either of a military settlement or, after the Romans conquered Judaea in 63 BC, the requirements of the pottery-manufacturing enterprise of which strong evidence has been unearthed during the past decade by the Israel Antiquities Authority’s own officially appointed archaeological team led by Dr. Yitzhak Magen and Dr. Yuval Peleg. Given the combined indications described so far, it would appear that the curators — paradoxically also affiliated with the Antiquities Authority — have chosen, wittingly or not, to keep from the viewing public certain material facts supportive of the view that the Scrolls came from Jerusalem libraries. Other statements made in the exhibit make it all the more evident that the curators have been arbitrarily one-sided in the choice of facts presented or omitted by them. Viz.: • Close on the heels of the above statements, one finds the assertion that “Jerusalem and the Second Temple were destroyed by Titus, and the people were again sent into exile, marking the end of the Second Temple period.” It is impossible to understand how the curators could allow such a misleading statement to appear in the exhibitions.
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